Fortress Captain

October 14, 1943 at RAF Chelveston. Eight B-17 pilots fresh from the school are lined up facing Lt. Col. W.E. Sault, operations officer of Bond) Group 305. and you could learn a lot of things when the crews come back. It was about the second raid on Schweinfurt and the Squadron's 15 B-17s, of which only two returned. This afternoon we knew the time for games and laughs was over.
Chelveston was a dismal base, a slum of open country huts and shacks and the center of a sea mud. The base was still under construction when Bomb Group 305 arrived there. The runways and taxiways that the Irish workers had built there were so badly done that they creaked under the weight of the B-17s. These were the first difficulties we encountered, we greenhorns recently arrived from the comfortable bases in the USA. I was the captain of a B-17 at the time and on my first landing at Chelveston I was "taxiing" too close to the edge of an escape route and getting stuck so deeply that we all had to get into it. the ten to clear the wheel I was too ashamed to call a bulldozer.
The assignment to Bomb Group 305 was essentially the final course in flying the B-17, and the inexperience of the new did not engender the sarcasm of the "moustachioed", who helped them rather than mocking them. Arriving from Bovingdon, where we spent most of our time following combat briefings in the B-17, I received a "cuckoo registered 42-4515 which the previous owner had called "Target for Tonite" (objective for this night ), with which I had to carry out 31 missions. "Target for Tonite" was more prosaically known as "Penthouse F-Freddie"; “Penthouse being the radio callsign for 422 Squadron and F the individual letter of the aircraft. It was one of 12 B-17s to be painted black shortly after the Schweinfurt mission and fitted with anti-glare machine gun end caps in order to operate at night, at high altitude and in combination with the RAF. 422 Squadron was also the first, aside from Pathfinder Squadrons, to use the top-secret Gee receiver. This was capable of picking up stations deeply established in Germany and allowed direction finding accurate to within 15 meters. Even though pilots weren't allowed to use it, it was still a great help in the bad weather we usually flew in and when entry and exit on the east coast of England was limited to 1.6 km narrow corridors. It was October 1943, sixteen months after my first solo flight in a frail Stearman PT-17 biplane, and I was discovering what it was like to fly a B-17.

First contact

Hendricks AFB's sole mission was to familiarize pilots with the B-17 before sending them to combat training units. Eccentricities were not tolerated there:a pilot was sent to prison after trying to do aerobatics with a B-17! This Boeing, which American pilots rarely called Flying Fortress or even “Fort”, but more simply 17” (Seventeen), was an easy plane to fly:the result of sound design without questionable compromises. It tolerated many errors from its pilots. It was also basically built to bring its crew back, even in sometimes near-zero aerodynamic conditions...
The B-17 cornered like a truck - maybe that's the reason why fighter pilots called us "heavyweight drivers" - and every B-17 pilot who worked his machine developed a callus across his left palm from scraping the tiller.

Boeing had designed the B-17 for maximum pilot comfort, and visibility was excellent. It behaved very well in formation and could be flown with its wing into the neighbour's porthole, placing its wingtip in the wake of the engines of the Leader's aircraft. The loss of lift, with flaps and landing gear retracted, was preceded by jerks and, at 170 km/h, the nose dipped for direct recovery. All out, the B-17 was stalling at 150 km/h at 22,700 kg, and the shaking was more pronounced, as if the plane was trying to tell the pilot to stop fooling around and fly straight.

High altitude flight

Essentially a high-altitude aircraft, the B-17 had oxygen supply equipment. The first were constant flow:an “abomination”, which consisted of a balloon that was freezing hard and crews that monitored each other to detect possible cases of anoxia as soon as possible. The B-17F had an oxygen system with adjustable flow up to 100 p. This caused a scandal later in the 8th Air Force, when it was discovered that pure oxygen was the most radical way to sober up. The cold was the enemy at high altitude, and the machine gunners were equipped with heated suits. Cockpit heating was excellent and bulky flight clothing was seldom worn as inconvenient.

Night missions

Major Price, commanding 422 Squadron, pointed to "F-Freddie" and said, "It's yours, go fly it." » That's what we did... and we got lost after a few minutes, coming back thanks to the QDMs (headings given by radio to reach an aerodrome) and the rockets fired from the ground, to stick to this damn mud. Nobody ever tells us why the 422 operated at night and pilots commonly thought that we were forming a guinea pig unit to determine if the loss ratio on night missions at high altitude justified the redeployment of other day Squadrons on nights. We did a probationary mission (Bullseye) with the RAF and were declared operational. My birthday present of November 10, 1943 consisted of a 3-4 hour walk over Rouen, in the company of 6 other B-17s, for a mysterious diversionary mission immediately ordered by the RAF.
In a way, we were the newsagents of the 8th Air Force, because we sprinkled the French countryside with leaflets announcing that the Allied aircraft were flying day and night, information known to our readers. We also threw editions, nicely illustrated with photos of political leaders, to occupied France; these pretty editions were known back home as "toilet paper".
On December 16, the RAF mounted a major offensive on Hanover, and we were required to fly at 8,000 meters and bomb into a carpet of yellow and green Pathfinder rockets. Much lower were the Stirlings and Lancasters under constant flak and hunting fire. We were surrounded by the beams of searchlights, but luckily we had been trained to fly with the seat down and with instruments. These were gyroscopic and had questionable operation at altitude, often putting us at the limit of losing lift when making an uphill turn. “F-Freddie” remained practically intact and was attacked only twice during the descent on the Channel, on the return from mission. Later, during a raid on I-1 Ilclesheim, 'Target for Tonite' came back on two engines, following an oil cooler defection, and landed at Manston without problems.
And then one day, 24 hours after the 31st mission, the crew of “Target for Tonite” found themselves aboard the Ile de France to return home on leave.

Epilogue

At the Paris Air Show in 1973, having a drink with Air Marshall Sir Christopher Hartley, I explained to him my theory on the night loss ratio; he calmly laughs it off...saying that the reason for keeping 422 Squadron in the air was much more important. At the time he was indeed Squadron Leader, his unit was developing long-range radar tracking systems and we were the guinea pigs at high altitude. We allowed him to take his measurements. It’s nice to learn that decades after the fact. I hope, positively, that the leaflets that we launched have nevertheless pleased - more or less someone, somewhere!